Building The Underhive – How To Create Your Own Slice Of The Lower Levels

One of the real attractions of Necromunda, is the idea of campaigns. Yes, the Underhive boxed game is fun (I’ve had a couple of play throughs now and it is a genuinely enjoyable game), but it’s not the big draw for me. I, like so many of you, want to create a deep dark world for my gangs to run through, fight through and interact with. I want their homes, hovels, workshops, mines and more to be fleshed out, built up and given as much personality as the gangers themselves.

I will be playing through a campaign in the new year with my good ol’ buddy, Henry whose Esher gang are coming along rather wonderfully, as I struggle to find the time to work on my Goliaths. But more on the minis later. We’re just going to be doing a small, two player campaign, but I want it to have as much of a narrative as possible. I want to create the atmosphere, and give our little slice of the Underhive, on the borders of our gangs’ territories some real personality.

So, how do we start doing this? Well, as with so many things, the name can help to craft the identity of an area. And seeing as this blog may as well be called the ‘Sci Fi Name Generator Blog’ these days, I cracked open the spreadsheets yet again, and began to craft something a bit different.

This name generator helps you to name the areas of your own Underhive realm. Essentially, you get your trusty D6s out and roll on the D66 tables below for your random areas. Use one or two descriptors (I find one usually does, but mix it up as much as you like), and one of the Area Types. Add “The” before the name if it makes it sound better (some do, some don’t), and enjoy! Use it how you see fit, and there’s no harm in rerolling things – not everything sounds great so you enjoy it as you want to.

Now, for gang specific areas – perhaps where your gangs are starting off, you can use the Gang Specific Area types. Just a D6 for each of these, and add the descriptors you roll/like.

Define how many areas you need/want, and make a little map for your own reference. You can draw this, make the areas whatever shape you’d like, and create your world. In the below example, I’ve just taken an image (it’s actually the industrial dockside area of Antwerp, Belgium, taken from Google maps satellite view and grey-scaled) and used a basic image editor to create this:

And straight away, the Underhive starts to come to life. The Lightless Stores are a particularly dark area of ancient, corroded storage containers, and sheds long abandoned and left. to the perpetual night. The Insect Stacks are bug-ridden, and full of carnivorous beasties of the invertebrate variety, while Golden Alley is a somewhat ironic name – a deal went down there long ago that made one man very rich and a lot of others very dead… And The Broken Tunnels lead to the rest of the Underhive, though they are full of pitfalls, rusted holes and treacherous gaps that have claimed many a ganger, and more dangers than you could imagine.

This is just a small campaign version played between two players, but you can go as big as you like:

Create your own slice of the Underhive and give it all the personality you can. You can even tailor your boards to match the names on the map (as much as your terrain stash and budget will allow of course). I hope you get some use out of it all and enjoy playing around with it – I’ve had a lot of fun building it up actually – almost more than the gang name generators.

On a different note, I wanted to alert you to the fact that Heresy And Heroes is on Instagram – you can find my account right here. It’s not just miniatures; you’ll be treated to life drawing efforts (along with other doodles), random shots of London, my ugly mug and a lot of pubs too. But if you want to follow me on there, you can keep up to date with my miniatures efforts in a different way.

As you can see, my first Goliath is now done. I’ve not had a chance to properly photograph the first member of the Jagged Aggressors yet, but if you follow the Instagram Account, you’ll see when I do. Or of course, you can just keep your eyes on the blog. I hope you have a great weekend, and some fun gaming and painting times. Onwards!

8 comments on “Building The Underhive – How To Create Your Own Slice Of The Lower Levels”

Nice work John! I particularly like the map concept you’ve come up with.

Our campaign is going down a more numerous route (once I get my Orlocks that is!) but we’re equally focused on the narrative side. In fact, the background narrative to my gang is going live on the blog tonight (https://gdbrotherhood.blogspot.co.uk/) so look out for more narative sections as we get more guys joining up.

I really like the idea of territory name generators too, some very enthusiastic thumbs up for that idea from me here!

It’s not meant to match the tiles – it’s more just a way of forging a narrative for your Games. This is more for Gang War than UnderhiveBut if you had tiles that made sense with some of the names, there’s no reason you couldn’t use it for that too!

Cool! Yea, I think I would be plotting out tiles or scenery for each area. But each little building could be its own set of tiles. Maybe different places have slightly different thematic look or different objects/loot. Like the Lightless Stores you mentioned, consisting mostly of derelict storage containers. I’ll have to learn up the rules, so I know more of what I’m talking about first though.

Great paint job on your Goliath Ganger too. Looks loads better than the pics GW posted. I just knew I was going to dig these more once I saw other people painting them.